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The rush to make profits out of carbon-fixing engenders another kind of colonialism.
-Centre for Science and the Environment, India
1. Introduction
To understand the impact of "pollution permits" and "emissions trading"1 on the ecological crisis, the findings of the international scientific community must be noted. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a UN advisory body numbering 3,000 scientists, concluded in 2001 that "the present CO2 concentration has not been exceeded during the past 420,000 years and likely not during the past 20 million years."' The clear and alarming consensus in the scientific community is that humankind is wreaking havoc on the atmosphere. Across the world 80 million people are at severe risk of their homes and livelihoods being destroyed by flash flooding as sea levels rise, fed by melting icecaps, and extreme weather events become more frequent. Although these weather changes will occur everywhere, poorer countries will have less ability to adapt. Meanwhile the emissions of greenhouse gases, that are creating the problems, come overwhelmingly from the richer industrialized countries that do have the resources to adapt. For example the US and the EU, with only 10 percent of the world's population, are responsible for producing 45 percent of all emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), the principle greenhouse gas.3
Three-quarters of all the CO2 emitted by human activities is from burning fossil fuels.4 The rest mostly comes from deforestation. The IPCC concludes that an immediate reduction of 50-70 percent of carbon dioxide emissions is necessary to stabilize the concentrations in the atmosphere. In their most recent report, they state that "eventually CO2 emissions would need to decline to a very small fraction of current emissions." Faced with this looming climate crisis, the global community of state's response has been passage of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, slowly ratified by 156 countries, and infamously rejected by the world's biggest polluter - the US. At the core of the Protocol is an agreement to reduce emissions by an average of 5.2 percent below 1990 levels of greenhouse gases by the year 2012.5 Larry Lohmann vividly sums up the inadequacy:
Shortly after the treaty was initialed in 1997, a scientific journal pointed out that 30 Kyotos would be needed just to stabilize atmospheric concentrations at twice...